Tag Archives: Motives of Credibility

On Signs and Wonders

Once when Our Lord was coming into Capharnaum, He was approach by an official there asking Him to come and heal his son.  Jesus tells him, “unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe” (John 4:49).  One might be tempted to read this as a rebuke, but it is clear from the fact that Jesus did heal his son that He was instructing His followers that miracles are an essential element for the spreading of the Faith.  Miracles are one of the Motives of Credibility (CCC 156) by which the act of faith is deemed reasonable and thus we should expect to find them everywhere the gospel is preached.  Our age is unique in that we no longer wonder at signs, but instead assume there is some, perhaps hitherto unknown, natural explanation for everything we experience.  Immersed in such a culture, Catholics give little thought to the miraculous and the role that they might play in the conversion of many in our world.

What Are Miracles?

Miracles are, according to St. John Henry Newman, “irregularities in the economy of nature, but with a moral end…Thus while they are exceptions to the laws of one system, they may coincide with those of another.”  What he means by this is not that they are mere exceptions to the physical order, but that they belong properly to Divine Providence and that God uses them with some regularity for a “moral end.”  This “moral end” highlights the fact that they are signs that God uses for the very specific purpose of drawing people to the central saving mission of Christ.  It is meant to be a divine stamp of approval that the message of the gospel is true.  Furthermore, although we use the term colloquially for anything that causes us to wonder (like the “miracle of life”), St Thomas says that a true miracle is one that has a cause that is hidden from everyone and can only be attributed to God Himself.

In his Oath Against Modernism, Pope St. Pius X taught that it was necessary to “accept and acknowledge the external proofs of revelation, that is, divine acts and especially miracles and prophecies as the surest signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion and I hold that these same proofs are well adapted to the understanding of all eras and all men, even of this time.”  Modernism has infected the Church so that many people think miracles were simply the effect of a primitive culture in which people were superstitious and did not understand the laws of nature. Belief in miracles, far from depending on ignorance of the laws of nature, requires knowledge.  You cannot deem something extraordinary if you do not know what is ordinary.  They were well aware that water does not directly become wine and that dead people don’t merely walk out of their tombs when commanded. 

It is this Modernist infection that has caused many “theologians” and preachers to explain away the miracles of Jesus with some natural explanation. The problem with this is that if Jesus did not perform miracles then His followers can’t do likewise in His name.  The power embedded in the gospel message is gone.   

Miracles and Free Will

Often Christians will reject the idea that God uses miracles because it appears to impede a person’s free will.  This is obviously not true when we look at examples of the gospels.  For example, many people saw the three hours of darkness that preceded the Crucifixion, but presumably only the Centurion believed.  That is because the act of belief is not in the miracle per se, but the consequences of the miracle.  The Centurion cooperated with the grace to believe that “this truly is the Son of God” while the others simply accepted the fact that they had experienced something unexplainable.  A similar thing happens when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead.  The Jews were unwilling to accept the consequence of the miracle (Jesus was Who He said He was) and instead wanted to kill Him and Lazarus both.  The point is that each miracle has a grace of belief attached to it that not everyone will cooperate with.

Somewhat tangentially, the example of the three hours of darkness serves as a good example of rejecting the miraculous.  Most people would say that it was merely an eclipse.  The problem of course with that is that an eclipse normally lasts for about 8 minutes and not three hours.  Furthermore, the Jewish Passover always occurs with a full moon (Lev. 23:5), and it is astronomically impossible to have an eclipse at such a time. Christ must have hung on the Cross in almost complete darkness and everyone around must have known that something was going on.

After Our Lord cursed the fig tree, He told the Apostles “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will ” (Mk 11:22-24).  He expects His followers not only to believe in His miracles but to believe that they will do “greater works than these” (John 14:12).  He cautions them that the only true obstacle is doubt and so it is important that we come to expect the miraculous to occur.

Motives of Credibility

If it is possible to describe a book that has survived for nearly eight centuries as a “hidden gem” then St. Thomas’ other Summa, the Summa Contra Gentiles, qualifies.  As the name suggests, St. Thomas wrote it as a response to the re-emergence of non-Christian philosophy and the rise of Islam.  It is by far his greatest work of apologetics for the Christian faith and in that regard,  it remains a preeminent work and an untapped resource for the Church.  In the first book, he sets out to show both the existence and nature of the Christian God.  In his usual thorough-going manner, he begins by showing how reasonable belief in the Christian God actually is.

Catholics, even down to our own day, are often accused of fideism.  Fideism is the view that religious beliefs are settled only by faith and unsupported by reason.  To be clear, faith deals with claims that transcend human reason.  But they must still be grasped by human reason without doing violence to the human mind and way of thinking.  They cannot be “proven” in the scientific sense, but this does not mean there are no objective reasons why we should believe them to be true.  In an important early question, St. Thomas declares “that to give assent to the truths of Faith is not foolishness even though they are above reason”.

Objective vs Subjective Reasons

St. Thomas uncovers the objective motivations for belief, that is, why someone should believe, and not so much why an individual does believe.  This distinction is rather important because Christianity is often attacked on the basis of subjective motivations for belief.  Whether it is Freud’s father longing or Marx’s opium of the masses, St. Thomas has little interest in uncovering why someone believes (as an aside, you will be hard pressed to find another author, who is as prolific as St. Thomas, that uses personal pronouns less).  Instead he gives four motives for belief in the truth of Christianity.

First, he speaks of the witness of miracles.  Whenever God has spoken those truths that “exceed natural knowledge, He gives visible manifestation to works that surpass the ability of all nature.”  St. Thomas is simply repeating the Johannine principle that miracles should be seen as signs.  Our Lord and the Apostles would preach a message, and to confirm that message came from God, they manifested a physical sign in the form of some miracle.  Public miracles were a regular occurrence in the Early Church because of the need for their strong testimonial power.  In our age, St. Thomas says, miracles are not as necessary and so therefore are not as commonplace.  Nevertheless, “God does not cease to work miracles through His saints for the confirmation of the faith.”  Think of when the Church was an infant in the New World, and how the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe resulted in the conversion of 10 million people in less than a decade.  Or think of the Miracle of the Sun and the promise of protection to Portugal.  Or even the Shroud of Turin, the Eucharistic Miracles or the incorruptibility of some of the saints.  All of these defy scientific explanation (and not from a lack of trying) and yet serve as great signs of the truth of the Catholic faith. 

The second motive of credibility as the Catechism calls them (CCC 156) is the mass conversion to Christianity.  In order to be intellectually honest, you must wrestle with the question of how, despite unbelievably humble beginnings, Christianity spread to such epic proportions.  To chalk it up to good fortune is not only too hasty of a dismissal, but also unhistorical for four reasons.  First, it grew “in the midst of the tyranny of persecutions.”  Christianity was illegal for most of its first two and a half centuries.  Why would anyone sign up for it, unless it were true?  Better yet, why would everyone sign up for it?  Conversions came not just from Jews or slaves, but even from the upper classes—“both the simple and most learned, flocked to the Christian faith” St. Thomas says. 

Human nature being what it is, there is a tendency to spurn truths that surpass the human intellect.  That St. Thomas makes a defense of revelation shows just how true this is.  Men are very quick to dismiss those things that they cannot grasp.  Not only that, but Christianity teaches that “the pleasures of the flesh should be curbed” and “the things of the word should be spurned.”  This is, according to St. Thomas, “the greatest of miracles.” 

In an “enlightened” age such as ours, one dominated by the hubris of chronological snobbery, this is most certainly underappreciated.  There was no worldly advantage whatsoever to accepting the truths of the Faith.  Many men and women gave up everything in order to live as Christians.  Perhaps a few would be gullible enough to believe these things, but the Church grew 40% per decade for its first 300 years.  We must take seriously the “democracy of the dead” and not think ourselves wiser than the men upon whose shoulders we stand.

The Miracle of the Church

St. Thomas says that the third motive of credibility is related to the first and the fact the need for miracles in our age has been diminished.  It has been diminished because the greatest miracle (next to the Resurrection) is the Church herself.  One must wrestle with the historical fact of the enduring presence of the Church.  Or, as St. Thomas says, it is not necessary that the miracles “be further repeated, since they appear most clearly in their effect,” namely the presence of the Church.  Lawrence Feingold makes an argument in the form of a dilemma that further illuminates this point.  He says that either the Church spread by miracles, in which case God has confirmed her mission, or it spread without miracles.  Even if the latter is true, it would be no less miraculous to have lasted 2000 years.  Anyone who immerses themselves in Church history and is unafraid to confront the messy human elements, must quickly conclude that the Church as a merely human institution should have failed long ago.  I fear that our own time may, in hindsight, feed this motive of credibility.

The “longevity” argument is often countered by the example of Islam.  St. Thomas, mostly by way of anticipation, shows how it is precisely in lacking the motives of credibility, that Islam is shown to be a false religion.  Muhammad, St. Thomas says “did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration.”  Secondly, it was spread not by the force of truth, but by the sword.  This is not to whitewash Christian history and say that there weren’t any forced conversions, but that it spread despite being at the wrong end of the sword.  Islam (again even if there are individual Muslims who sincerely choose Islam) has always spread mainly by force which are “signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.”  Finally, Muhammad lacks the final motive of credibility, prophecy—”Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness.”

The growth of the Church was prophesied both in the New Testament (c.f. Mt 13, 16) and Old Testament (c.f. Dan 2).  But most striking is the fact that the Old Testament, a collection of books written over the course of hundreds of years, predicted the coming of Christ.  This, if we are to be intellectually honest, cannot be easily dismissed.  His arrival was even predicted within a very specific window of time (c.f. Daniel 9).

In closing, we would be remiss if we did not make an important distinction.  These motives of credibility are reasons why we should believe in Christian revelation.  They clear the way for the infusion of divine Faith, by which we assent to everything God has revealed.  Like all of God’s gifts, there is always give and take.  He gives, but we must take, and we take not by grasping but by removing the impediments we have erected to the reception of the gift.  The motives of credibility help to remove those impediments.